This invention concerns devices for generating an alerting sound which make an occupant of a residence or other building aware of the presence of someone at the door who wishes to contact the occupant.
A door bell is often provided to more easily alert an occupant of the presence of someone at the door. When a button is pressed by the visitor, a sound is produced within the building such as the ringing of a bell or a buzzer.
The visitor may also simply knock on the door with a clenched fist in the age old manner to make his or her presence known to an occupant of the building. However, delivery personnel may make many calls in the course of the day and may over time experience discomfort or chronic injury from repetitively knocking on the door with his or her fist. Potentially injurious pounding of a hand on the hard surface of a door may discourage the delivery personnel from making a determined knocking effort, thus lowering the chances that a person will hear the knock and respond.
Another very common device to assist the visitor is the door knocker comprised of a pivoted knocker piece which strikes a fixed metal piece mounted on the door to enable a knocking sound to be made without requiring the visitor to knock on the door with his or her bare fist.
When a visitor attempts to announce his or her presence at the door by any one of these traditional practices it is usually not certain whether the occupant has heard the knocking or the door bell.
This is because the door bell often is not working or is not loud enough to alert an occupant in places within the building far from the door or the door bell sounder.
Similarly, a knocker may also not produce a loud enough sound to be heard in remote areas within the building, which also can happen with a visitor directly knocking on the door, especially if the visitor is reluctant to knock loudly due to a tenderness of his or her knuckles.
Furthermore, door bells, pivoted knockers, or other means are often not provided for a caller to use.
In some instances, when there is no response, a delivery driver will need to attempt a re-delivery, sometimes more than once, which wastes both time and resources of the delivery company.
Sophisticated electronic door bell systems have been developed which can provide voice messaging and other desired communications between an occupant and a visitor, but these have generally been too complex and expensive to make and install to come into general use. See for example devices described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,774,039; 6,721,408; 6,759,955; and U.S. patent publications 2006/0078102 and 2004/0057567.
The problems with conventional practices are especially acute for delivery personnel, door-to-door salespeople, census takers, mail carriers, etc. and for emergency personnel engaged in warning building occupants of the need to evacuate the premises.
Also, hotel and apartment staff may want to alert occupants of rented rooms or suites that they are about to enter the room for cleaning or other housekeeping purposes since ideally an entry should be announced by the staff personnel if the room is occupied to avoid unnecessarily startling the occupant.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a simple, low cost reliable device for generating a loud penetrating alerting sound able to be reliably heard within the interior of a building so that occupants will more certainly be made aware of a visitor being present at the door when compared with traditional methods described.
It is a further object of the invention to provide such a device which while being simple allows voice messages and/or other audio sounds to be broadcast into a building interior from a location adjacent the exterior of the building.
It is yet another object of the invention to provide such a device which is compact, lightweight and self-contained so as to allow portability by delivery and other personnel to be able to be hand carried and handled as necessary at any location at which they call without requiring any electrical connections or physical changes to be made to the building where the person is attempting to make contact with an occupant.
Another object of this invention is to provide a device for broadcasting verbal messages to occupants of a building that are in their language which may be of a different language than that of the user of the device or that of the language of pre-recorded messages stored in a source of audio signals included in the device of this invention.
It is another object of the invention to eliminate any need for people to forcefully knock at doors with their fists or to yell in order to gain the attention of an occupant of a building, thus eliminating potential hand injury or straining of the voice.